Saturday, August 09, 2014

Under U.S. and UN
Pressure, Uganda Laws on Homosexuality Set Aside for Now

Austin
Ruse

NEW YORK, August 8 (C-Fam) The
constitutional court of Uganda has ruled the laws against certain predatory
homosexual activity is unconstitutional, ending however briefly the
international conflict the laws have aroused in the United States and other
industrialized nations.

The law was struck down on
procedural grounds, the court determining the law was enacted without the
requisite number of lawmakers present when it was passed. The constitutional
court is not the highest court in Uganda and the Attorney General is already
talking about appealing the decision to Uganda’s Supreme Court. The Uganda
Parliament could also reenact the law with the required number of
Parliamentarians present.

The law called for lengthy prison
sentences for, among other things, deliberately infecting another person with
the AIDs virus and the rape of an underage person. Commentators in the west
have spread the false rumor that gays were being imprisoned simply for “being
gay.”

International
pressure against Uganda for the law has been intense. Donor countries,
including the United States, had recently frozen $120 million in aid to
cash-strapped Uganda in protest of the law, this even though Uganda is one of
the poorest countries in the world and is also one of the United States’ key
military allies in the region against Islamic terrorists in Sudan, South
Somalia, and the Central African Republic.

Many are critical that the Obama
administration has made LGBT one of America’s foremost foreign policy agenda
items, even though the world seems to be melting down in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq,
Israel and elsewhere. The Administration, charged with dithering in all these
crisis areas, reiterated the LGBT policy this week as African leaders met in
Washington DC for the largest such gathering in history.

Critics
point out that at a time when Christians around the world are being hunted,
tortured and murdered, the Obama administration seems not to care, indeed
barely mentions the issue. This is particularly vexing to Christians since they
comprise 77% of the adult population of the US while gays comprise only 1.6%,
according to new numbers released by the Center for Disease Control. That would
be 187,000,000 Christians whose fellow religionists are being killed by
terrorists, while gays number only 3.8 million, half as many as Methodists, one
of the smallest denominations in the US.

The president of Uganda has said
that one of the reasons he signed the law was because of the intense pressure
brought by the rich countries against Uganda. No less than Foreign Policy
Magazine covered this issue a few months ago, citing not just President Obama
but pundits on leftist television channels like Rachel Madow on MSNBC. The
President of Uganda and others saw this as a new form of colonialism, in this
case sexual colonialism; the rich west trying to impose a new morality that
Ugandans find offensive. Uganda has a long history of resisting gay
initiatives. In fact, the Catholic Church around the world celebrates a feast
day for Charles Lwanga and his companions, young African men who resisted the
homosexual overtures of the King and were martyred for their resistance.

The Ugandans have also insisted the
law has been deliberately misinterpreted by western commentators who often say
the law makes it illegal simply for “being gay.” In fact, all provisions of the
law have to do with actions and not “being.” Based on this plea, Sweden
recently returned as a donor to Uganda.